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263The epistemology of testimony (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2006.Testimony is a crucial source of knowledge: we are to a large extent reliant upon what others tell us. It has been the subject of much recent interest in epistemology, and this volume collects twelve original essays on the topic by some of the world's leading philosophers. It will be the starting point for future research in this fertile field. Contributors include Robert Audi, C. A. J. Coady, Elizabeth Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Sanford C. Goldberg, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey, Keith Lehrer, …Read more
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115Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in EpistemologyCambridge University Press. 1991.From the back cover: "Ever since Plato, philosophers have faced one central question: What is the scope and nature of human knowledge? In this volume the distinguished philosopher Ernest Sosa has collected his essays on this subject written over a period of twenty-five years. All the major topics of contemporary epistemology are covered: the nature of propositional knowledge, externalism versus internalism, foundationalism versus coherentism, and the problem of the criterion. The resulting book …Read more
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35Natural theology and naturalist atheology: Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalismIn Deane-Peter Baker (ed.), Alvin Plantinga, Cambridge University Press. 2007.
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1Plantinga on Epistemic InternalismIn Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Warrant and Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge, Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 73-87. 1996.
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234How Must Knowledge Be Modally Related to What Is Known?Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 373-384. 1999.
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123RepliesPhilosophical Papers 40 (3). 2004.Philosophical Papers, Volume 40, Issue 3, Page 341-358, November 2011
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102The foundations of foundationalismNoûs 14 (4): 547-564. 1980.There is a controversy in contemporary philosophy over the question whether or not knowledge must have a foundation. On one side are the foundationalists, who do accept the metaphor and find the foundation in sensory experience or the like. The coherentists, on the other side, reject the foundations metaphor and consider our body of knowledge a coherent whole floating free of any foundations. This controversy grew rapidly with the rise of idealism many years ago, and it is prominent today not on…Read more
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151Mind-body interaction and supervenient causationMidwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1): 271-81. 1984.The mind-body problem arises because of our status as double agents apparently en rapport both with the mental and with the physical. We think, desire, decide, plan, suffer passions, fall into moods, are subject to sensory experiences, ostensibly perceive, intend, reason, make believe, and so on. We also move, have a certain geographical position, a certain height and weight, and we are sometimes hit or cut or burned. In other words, human beings have both minds and bodies. What is the relation …Read more
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44Reflective Knowledge: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume IiOxford University Press. 2009.Reflective Knowledge draws together ground-breaking work in epistemology by Ernest Sosa. He argues for a reflective virtue epistemology based on virtuous circularity, shows how this idea may be found explicitly or just below the surface in such illustrious predecessors as Descartes and Moore, and defends the view against its rivals.
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7Philosophical Issues, Action TheoryWiley-Blackwell. 2012.This is a collection of papers on action theory, very broadly conceived. It contains cutting-edge work by some of the most important contributors in the field
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8For the Love of Truth?In Abrol Fairweather & Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (eds.), Virtue epistemology: essays on epistemic virtue and responsibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 49-62. 2001.Rational beings pursue and value truth . Intellectual conduct is to be judged, accordingly, by how well it aids our pursuit of that ideal. I ask whether these platitudes mean, and whether they are true.
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94Tracking, competence, and knowledgeIn Paul K. Moser (ed.), The Oxford handbook of epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 264--287. 2002.In “Tracking, Competence, and Knowledge,” Ernest Sosa notes that in attempting to account for the conditions for knowledge, externalists have proposed that the justification condition be replaced or supplemented by the requirement that a certain modal relation be obtained between a fact and a subject's belief concerning that fact. While assessing attempts to identify such a relation, he focuses on an account labeled “Cartesian‐tracking”, which accounts for the relation in the form of two conditi…Read more
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17Experience and the Objects of Perception (review)Review of Metaphysics 39 (1): 142-144. 1985.This study aims primarily at an account of sensory experience and perception uncommitted to objectual sense data or sense impressions. In the end it does make room for sense impressions, but only as entities somehow abstracted from phenomenological attention to sense experience. The "phenomenological standpoint" is attained by imagining "that a transparent screen has been placed at right angles about three feet from your eyes between you and all the objects before you," and by imagining further …Read more
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92Summary ofReflective KnowledgePhilosophical Papers 40 (3): 285-285. 2011.Philosophical Papers, Volume 40, Issue 3, Page 285, November 2011
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198Knowledge and Intellectual VirtueThe Monist 68 (2): 226-245. 1985.An intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error; or so let us assume for now, though a more just conception may include as desiderata also generality, coherence, and explanatory power, unless the value of these is itself explained as derivative from the character of their contribution precisely to one’s surplus of truth over error. This last is an issue I mention in order to lay it aside. Here we assume only a teleological conception of intellectual v…Read more
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63A Virtue Epistemology: Volume I: Apt Belief and Reflective KnowledgeOxford University Press UK. 2007.A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and scepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties of s…Read more
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100Reliability and the a prioriIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 369--384. 2002.
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44De re belief, action explanations, and the essential indexicalIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman & Nicholas Asher (eds.), Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, Cambridge University Press. pp. 235--249. 1995.
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Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2010.Jaegwon Kim is one of the most pre-eminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect facts and events, the analysis of supervenience, and the mind-body problem. A central problem in the ph…Read more
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816A defense of the use of intuitions in philosophyIn Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 101--112. 2009.
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37Water, drink, and "moral kinds"Philosophical Issues 8 303-312. 1997.Geoffrey Sayre-McCord puts before us an interesting and original line of thought. Here is its main structure: Naturalist semantics would bring important benefits to ethics. But it has very high costs. Fortunately, we can secure such benefits without the costs, by substituting, for the natural kinds of naturalist semantics, a set of moral kinds determined not by scientific but by moral theory. I find myself stumped by the preliminaries at , however, which need further support, or so I will argue …Read more